From "Healing Community: Small group ministry as a spiritual practice," UU World, January/February 2005. Recall a time when you were filled with joy. Where were you? At home? At a concert? A party? Maybe you were in a religious service or on vacation....

Love beyond belief, according to Thandeka, means that personal experience has three basic elements for us as Unitarian Universalists: (1) a change of heart, (2) a congregational ethos of care and compassion, (3) doctrinal freedom to explore various sources to explain our religious feelings and...

The Reverend Dr. Thandeka is cited as one of our most influential contemporary Unitarian Universalist theologians. She is the author of The Embodied Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Solution to Kant's Problem of the Empirical Self and Learning To Be White: Money, Race, and God in America, and...

There was an extraordinary range of personal beliefs among the participants in my 2003 small group workshop in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. They were the delegates, staff and visitors attending the annual meeting of the International Council of Unitarians and Universalists....

Several years ago, I spent an evening discussing Covenant Groups with members of a New England church who were interested in starting a small group ministry program....

In July 2003, I went on an eight-day spiritual retreat at a Benedictine monastery in Wisconsin. The night before I left Chicago to drive to the monastery, as preparation for the journey, I made a series of decisions about what kinds of clothes I would need while on this retreat. I was thorough. I...

Information and short excerpts from the writings of William F. Schulz—presented in five sections, or topics, for ease of study and discussion—convey his theological point of view. All quotations are used with permission of William F. Schulz. I: Assessment of Human Nature William F. Schulz...

This professional biography was provided by Dr. Schulz in 2009. On November 3, 2010, The Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) announced that Dr. William F. Schulz had been named the new UUSC president and chief executive officer. "William Schulz......

Excerpted from the 2006 Berry Street Lecture. When I was seven or eight years old, I lived across the street from a little dog named Amy. Every afternoon after my school let out, Amy and I would play together for an hour. One of Amy's favorite games was a dancing game in which I held her two...

In the largely secularized culture and language of our time, the subject of this chapter is by no means one that elicits universal interest. To many serious-minded people phrases such as "the love of God," "God's love for us," or "the human response to God's love" are almost meaningless. Yet the...

James Luther Adams, published in On Being Human Religiously (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1976). Used with permission. Note: Bold text did not appear in the original. It is added here to highlight passages mentioned in "Preparing to lead this workshop" in the workshop's Introduction.

Three major elements in the Pragmatic Theory of Religious Beliefs James Luther Adams highlights three major elements of in his Pragmatic Theory of Religious Beliefs: (1) behavior, (2) a feeling that prompts, accompanies, or stands in tension to the behavior, (3) a belief, the meaning of which is...

Religion Adams claims that religion is a universal experience. To be human, Adams argues, is to be religious because the purpose of religion is to identify what gives fundamental meaning and fulfillment to human life....

Drawn from Adams' essays and his autobiography, Not Without Dust and Heat. By the time of his death in 1994 at age 92, James Luther Adams was recognized as one of the preeminent Christian social ethicists and theologians of the 20th century. In his work, he emphasized personal and institutional...

James Luther Adams, from "The Evolution of My Social Concern." Used with permission, Herbert F. Vetter, Harvard Square Library....

No matter how much of a humanist one may be, it would seem impossible (at least to me) for a thoughtful and sincere person who is trying to be a citizen of the world, who knows sympathetically something of man's religious history, to feel it necessary to discard completely all the ideas or concep...

This was Sophia Lyon Fahs' 1960 Rufus Jones lecture, published by the Committee on Religious Education, Friends General Conference, Philadelphia, PA, 1960. Used by permission.  ...

This story is included in the second and third grade Tapestry of Faith curriculum, Faithful Journeys. "Mama, Mama, why do we just keep going and going and not going anywhere?" asked little Sophie. Her family was crossing the wide Pacific Ocean on a big ship bound for America. Sophie Lyon was an...

One of the creators of modern American theological liberalism, Sophia Lyon Fahs was also the progenitor of American Unitarian religious education as a modern theological science of human emotions. Born in 1876 to Presbyterian missionary parents in China, she embraced progressive educational...

Excerpted from Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds, by Sophia Lyon Fahs. Copyright (C) 1965 by Sophia Lyon Fahs. Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. Two first-person anecdotes from Fahs' experiences as a religious educator, each followed by her analysis....